Questioning young children in court: A linguistic case study.

Abstract

When the competency of a witness is an issue in a court case, two of the tests that must be met are the capacity to understand the questions propounded and the ability to make intelligent answers. There is no reciprocal test that aquestioner must meet, however, that measures his or her competency to ask intelligent, easily understood, and unambiguous questions. For an adult witness, poorly worded questions may simply be a nuisance, but for a child, they may be a potentially serious source of miscommunication. In this analysis of the transcripts of one child's testimony, some aspects of this problem are exposed by means of a linguistic analysis of the questions asked and answers given. Three chief sources of communicative mischief are shown to be (a) age-inappropriate vocabulary, (b) complex syntax, and (c) general ambiguity. The child's legal competency is examined from the perspective of her linguistic and communicative competence, and some questions are raised about the criteria for determining competency.